Event Report: CPOSC 2012

Well, I'm writing this on the train on my way back from CPOSC 2012, another great year for the regional Central PA conference - it's small enough that you can really spend lots of time with someone, but big enough that it's worth my while to come from NYC for it and run a Fedora booth. I took a few photos of the booth that I was sadly alone at the booth for the first time this year, so I didn't attend any of the talks, but hopefully the slides will be posted for a few of them (I particularly wanted to go to "Why we love Git")

The event itself was a success, I got into a lively debate with someone from Perl Mongers about why he wouldn't even consider Python - he had the number one complaint that I hear about Python that folks tend to get over quickly (I know that I did) - the syntactical significance of whitespace. I personally think that this is one of the great features of Python since it enforces coding in a style that can be maintained. We agreed to disagree on this point, but it was a productive conversation.

There was also the requisite person that had no clue what Fedora was, and a few conversations about "selling people on moving to Fedora from Ubuntu". It's there that I think we have a particularly strong story, with the extremely anti-community announcements coming out of Canonical in the past few weeks - saying that there were developing some features of Ubuntu out of sight of the community until they were ready. I pointed out some stickers on my laptop (projects for which Fedora is either heavily involved or upstream), and particularly Katello - explaining how it is next-gen systems management that you can actually see and use today, no matter how immature it might be.

I also had a conversation with the organizer of FOSScon, which is another FOSS event in Philadelphia which takes place in August, and he'd love to have a Fedora table there! I told him to send me the details, and we can make that happen! All in all, a very successful event, and I can't wait for CPOSC 2013!

Now off to home to prepare for a hurricane that hopefully won't disrupt my life too much! I'm seriously planning for a dud, but I'm ready for minor inconvenience.